About

Ahh! I thought no-one read the About pages!

MIXTEL was the name that I thought up many years ago when I ran a small Prestel-style bulletin board for Sinclair Spectrum users. This ran (OK, crawled along) on a Speccy with three microdrives and a VTX modem that had been slightly modified to let it auto-answer. The name is, of course, short for “Mick’s Telephone”!

I didn’t run the system for very long (but I did once spot it listed in a BBS list in a magazine!) for several reasons. Firstly, I don’t recommend running your BBS on your only telephone line – even if you publish restricted operating hours!. Secondly, the microdrives were too slow really, meaning that I had to do some careful page arrangements to keep the most used pages near the start of the tape. Thirdly, I began to get withdrawal symptoms as my current favourite computer was tied up for several hours every evening!

So, MIXTEL had to close as a BBS. Once the internet came along what other name could I choose? It seems rather nice to combine that early little BBS with some of the latest communications technology; even nicer to now use that technology to run a web site about a machine I had *before* the Speccy!